The uglier the fashions, the worse places we’d have to pose to make them look good. Junkyards. Slaughterhouses. Sewage treatment plants. It’s the ugly bridesmaid tactic where you only look good by comparison.
I just didn’t want to be fixed. Whatever my real problems might be, I didn’t want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left?
So, Marla, how do you like them apples?
No doubt, this is the kind of stress the constantly mutating AIDS virus must feel.
Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just to buy the things they really don’t need.
You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled.
La gente casada siempre cree que el amor es la respuesta a todo.
Adulthood Begins the moment someone tells you, “You need to be more sensitive.
I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month?
Algunos actos son demasiado bajos hasta para tener nombre. Demasiado bajos para hablar de ellos.
Other reviewers hated it. Oh, they called it “too dark.” “Too violent.” “Too strident and shrill and dogmatic.” They would’ve loved “Barn-Raising Club.
A menos que todo empeore, nada puede mejorar.
Estamos todos atrapados. Es 1734 para siempre.
An airplane is just so many rows of people sitting and all going in the same direction a long ways off the ground. Going to New York’s a lot the way I imagine going to Heaven would be.
La belleza es poder, igual que el dinero es poder y que un arma cargada es poder.
Liberamos guerras. Luchamos por la paz. Combatimos el hambre. Nos encanta luchar. Luchamos y luchamos y luchamos, con armas, palabras o dinero. Y el planeta nunca es una pizca mejor de lo que era antes de nosotros.
I know, I know, in that totally archetypal Tom Sawyer scenario it’s supposed to be way satisfying to attend your own funeral and witness how everyone secretly loved and adored you, but the sad truth is that most people are just as fakey-fake to you after you’re dead as when you’re alive.
Up those stairs, to anybody after the fiftieth dude, Cassie Wright will look like a missile crater greased with Vaseline. Flesh and blood, but like something’s exploded inside her.
Since school, he’d come to expect so little from life. Nothing special, just to be treated with courtesy and politeness by the world. Wanted people to see him and not fear him, not admire him but just to see him. He wanted to be recognized so people would think twice before badgering or insulting him.
Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn’t an act of personal empowerment. It’s you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what’s best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to even know she’s in distress.